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ianwallace.com
 

I suffer from Acute SPAM-Title Similarity Anxiety

Whenever I want to write an e-mail to someone I don't know, or even to people I do, I struggle with the subject lines because they need to fulfill all these different criteria in this atmosphere of SPAM and e-mail worms. You need something that's descriptive of the e-mail's content, yet ungeneric to the point of being obviously ungeneric - but without seeming like some inane advertisers tack.

You can't use any business or computer terminology, because it's all in the headlines of e-mail worms. You can't reference anal sex - anal activity of any kind, really - because that's what's hip with the spammers this year. One must never speak of money; no shopping, finance, insurance or tax. No sense trying to include the name of a major product or service.

I honestly have no idea what is left. Adding "Not SPAM" or "legitimate" is just so obvious that the spammers got to it first. "Not SPAM" is SPAM's motto. There's no sense trying to devise some conventions for headlining e-mails, because the spammers will be copying them within a week. So I'll just muddle through somehow: I'm thinking about just writing people letters.

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